The Number 23

It turned out to be one of those movies that seems kind of interesting when you’re watching it, but then, when you’ve finished it, you can’t help but to notice how much time you just wasted. The problem is that The Number 23 takes the paranoia of the number 23 far too seriously, despite some scenes being totally hilarious. It wasn’t clear at certain parts whether we were supposed to laugh or not.

Also, some of the references to 23 seemed way too far-fetched. I thought it was cool that numerous events and even names (by adding their letters) were linked to the number 23, but what crossed the line was linking things to the number 32, which is explained of course as 23 backwards. If anything that adds to 32 can pass, why not just make the title of the film The Number 32 and have all the things that add up to 23 be explained as just 32 backwards? This made absolutely no sense.

Perhaps the funniest event was when Jim Carrey (I don’t really remember any of the names, except for a fictional character that exists in a book inside the movie) explains that a certain person is innocent of a crime just because his numbers don’t add up to 23. Almost by definition, there must be some way to make it add up to 23. In fact, after we watched the movie, some friends and I spent the next two hours turning literally anything we thought of into the number 23. This was probably more of a waste of time than watching the movie itself.

And then of course, the length of the paper that I handed in today was… okay yep, 23 pages. *Cues dramatic music.*